Hold The Applause Until After You Visit The Ice Cream Truck.

August 29, 1990|By Marla Donato.

On those long, hot, sunny, summer days many people wouldn`t think of going anywhere but to the beach. But not Matthew Owens and Nancy Bardawil. Last summer, a good time for these two performance artists was to load up a pickup truck with a bunch of realistic-looking fake cadavers, blast ``ice cream truck music`` over loudspeakers and then drive to neighborhood fests and crowded tourist haunts.

``It was great,`` said Owens. ``It really stimulated a reaction in people because we were playing `ice cream truck music,` and people would look up expecting ice cream and they would see a pile of cadavers. What was really interesting was the different reactions we got in different neighborhoods. For instance, in Pilsen, the Mexican community related to it because of their Day of the Dead celebrations, but at the Water Tower people thought it had something to do with the Holocaust or abortion or the environment.``

The latest stunt

This summer, Owens and Bardawil have expanded their repertoire to include a fullscale indoor production called ``The Monster Show,`` which ends tonight after running every Wednesday in August at Club Lower Links, 954 W. Newport Ave.

Each night featured a different cast of about a half-dozen performance artists in a gory vaudeville/freak show that also included video clips of B-grade horror films.

One lineup included the ubiquitous Brenden De Vallance, whose piece ``20 Monster Hits`` took its title from a vintage LP. For part of his act, De Vallance played an album that he had cut in half, flipped one side and then glued the pieces back together. The result was that when the album went around the turntable it played half of the front and half of the back with each rotation. While the album squawked, De Vallance launched into a poem called

``Why is the World So Worldly?``

Other highlights included Iris Moore, the snake lady, who promised

``reality is far more horrifying than anything you will see here tonight``

and then went on to recite a poem the audience hated.

But by far the most monstrous performances in the series were given by Owens himself, the master of ceremonies. He opened one show with a piece that featured an ugly, demented rubber baby popping out of a lifelike cadaver and later presented the ``Stuttgart Insect Theater,`` which concluded with him eating a bowl of live crickets.

So do you use a fork?

``That`s the first time I ever tried to eat crickets,`` he said. ``On the surface it was pure sensationalism, but it was also intended to lampoon traditional theater forms such as Japaneese No Theater or Shakespeare.``

By eating crickets?

``All through the piece I was talking about having an appreciation for other cultures and, well, you really have to see it to get it,`` he said.

``But most people did seem to. In fact, I don`t like to repeat pieces, but that one was so well received that I may do it again because it got such a visceral response.``

Visceral is right. Most people in the packed theater appeared to have been grossed out.

``Yeah. Wasn`t that great?`` Owens said. ``It`s not easy to get people to gross out these days. You have to go to great lengths when you consider what`s on TV and film. Any performance artist will tell you the hardest thing is to get any kind of reaction from the audience, period. The whole idea of performance art is to stimulate people and sensitize them to things that they don`t look at much anymore-like death. I think that`s why I`m so fascinated with these gory things, because they evoke a real response.``

It`s a carnival in there

For Bardawil, the gory arena is nothing new. Her father was a pathologist.

``He was always bringing home jars of specimens-you know, parts of people and tumors and strange growths,`` she said. ``But I`ve always been into death and gore. As a kid I would like to flip over the flagstones and find all the slimy things crawling underneath.``

Nowadays, Bardawil doesn`t have to go out of her way to find the grotesque. All she has to do is walk into the downtown workroom studio she shares with Owens. The space is crammed with all sorts of props that this pair has created out of plumbing plastic, fabric and latex. Although they look like the real thing, they`re really fake skulls, mummies, mutant babies, bloody body parts, decaying horses and dogs and a couple dozen cadavers. And when they`re not being escorted around the city in a pickup, the props are used to lend atmosphere to ``The Monster Show.``

Both Bardawil and Owens are graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have become so adept at making horror props that they created a group of mummies for the Chamber Opera of Chicago, and are currently working on a series of pig carcasses for the Chicago Historical Society`s

slaughterhouse display.

``The thing we`re most interested in is the performance art,`` said Owens. ``But we found that we could pay the rent by making these pieces. I guess you could say we lead a double life. When we`re not making pig carcasses and bloody head casts, we`re painting murals in people`s dining rooms.``

``Or nightclubs,`` added Bardawil. ``But it`s pretty much standard trompe l`oeil. We can`t do what we want, which would be things like baby dolls and razor blades. Or how about some trompe l`oeil spiked walls?``